[meteorite-list] Oriented chondrules?

[Graham Christensen]

Hi Darren
Chondritic meteorites come from asteroids that aren't quite large enough to 
have completely melted, but usually still large enough to cause some thermal 
alteration. The heat that was present might have made the chondrules 
sufficiently pliable that they squished into oval shapes due to the downward 
pressure from the material that was above it in its parent asteroid. Or, 
possibly the chondrules were already elongated but the pressure from above 
caused them to settle that way while the matrix was still soft.

Just throwing out ideas,
Graham

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Graham Christensen
voltage at telus.net
http://www.geocities.com/aerolitehunter
msn messenger: majorvoltage at hotmail.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse at charter.net>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 11:24 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Oriented chondrules?


(Sorry, last question of the night.)

Anyone know anything about "oriented" chondrules in a meteorite?  I was 
looking at the scan of that
condrite that I had shown in the question about polishing (thanks to all who 
gave advise, by the
way) and noticed that, for objects in the matrix that are oblong, the long 
axises of a large
percentage of them seem to be aligned in a prefered direction rather than 
point in random
directions.

Here is the base image:
http://webpages.charter.net/garrison6328/base_image.jpg

And one with arrows added to a few of the larger objects.  Many other 
chondrules seem to tend to be
aligned in the same direction.

http://webpages.charter.net/garrison6328/flow_direction.jpg
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